Rumors & Acquisitions: In and Out at Etsy

CATCH-A-DEV. “Catchafire just hired former lead engineer at Etsy, Jared Nuzzolillo, as well as two other engineers so the social enterprise could grow its tech team,” we’re told. But Mr. Nuzzolillo’s LinkedIn says differently: His page says he’s been at the non-profit/volunteer matchmaker for three months. That’d be almost five years in the Rob Kalin fold–after Etsy, he worked on the founder’s second start-up, Parachutes, still yet to launch. Jared! You didn’t finish the job! Etsy, for its part, just poached Michael Mannheimer from Willamette Week, where he wrote about music. UNRELATED: Tal Safran, freelancing TechStars hacker, announced he’s decided to work for Yipit.

INSIDE BASEBALL. Business Insider’s Alyson Shontell is sticking to her story that Turntable.fm has raised $7.5 million from all its initial StickyBits investors, plus one additional investor, even though Turntable’s founders are denying that the round has closed. “Wait three days and see if [co-founder Seth Goldstein] still denies,” she told a commenter.

“I know at least one of the major labels has already lawyer’d up for this and would expect them to hammer them with multiple suits shortly,” another wrote, suggesting that labels were waiting until the start-up got funded to sue.

Speaking of Turntable, we’re hearing buzz about a forthcoming mobile app. The start-up has an iOS developer on staff, but it’s unclear when the app will drop–and whether it’ll pass legal muster with Apple (and even Android, considering what happened to Grooveshark). “I know they were looking and have been in the process of hiring people, including another back-end dev,” said one developer who, at the beginning of Turntable’s beta, told Betabeat he’d kill to build their iPhone app.

HACK HACK, BEEP BEEP. This one is from the way back machine, but Betabeat hears that Gilt Groupe’splan to sell one Volkswagen Jetta a day for three days in mid-December got foiled by hackers. Twice! First by an intrepid iPhone user who set ahead his clock and beat the system, and the second time by a husband-and-wife team. The press release was out before Gilt realized what happened.

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